Background process window to monitor/stop zombies

Discussion of general topics about Mozilla Thunderbird
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xmontero
Posts: 30
Joined: April 1st, 2004, 4:18 am

Background process window to monitor/stop zombies

Post by xmontero »

Many times I've problems with Thunderbird as it hangs around doing things (indexing, or running filters, or whatsoever).

For some reasons, when I send messages thunderbird gets stuck at "sending" and then finishes telling "can't copy to xxx". So I loose the "proof" the sending process ended correctly and even I'm not able to tell if it was properly sent or not.

The worse: it LOOSES DATA. The sending window becomes inactive and I can't press "send" again. I can't rely on Thunderbird since a few months to now.

I've observed this increases in probablity when there are "other things" thunderbird is doing.

QUESTION:

I wonder if there's such a window like "show background processes" and I can kill/pause them so it is like "relaxed" then I can "send" and then re-start the pending background tasks it wanted to do.
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DanRaisch
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Re: Background process window to monitor/stop zombies

Post by DanRaisch »

See this in regard to logging -- http://kb.mozillazine.org/Session_logging_for_mail/news

Does the same thing occur if you launch the application in Mozilla Safe Mode? http://kb.mozillazine.org/Safe_mode
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tanstaafl
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Re: Background process window to monitor/stop zombies

Post by tanstaafl »

Sometimes sending a message will succeed (using SMTP) while the associated upload of a copy of the sent message (using IMAP) fails. They appear to be done by independent threads, and the upload will proceed if the initial request to the SMTP server to send a message was accepted, even if failed to send the message. This can be very frustrating.

Some email providers have an option to have the SMTP server automatically save a copy of the sent message in a folder. If you are using a IMAP account that would eliminate the need for Thunderbird to upload a copy of the sent message. I use that feature with Fastmail, which has a webmail setting to let you do that for selected personalities (From: email addresses) when using a email client. Gmail has a similar feature except its not optional - you can't disable it.

If your email provider doesn't support that feature, one workaround would be to use the sent folder in Local Folders instead of the remote sent folder. The downside is you'd lose the ability to share that folder with other machines and webmail.

"The worse: it LOOSES DATA. The sending window becomes inactive and I can't press "send" again. I can't rely on Thunderbird since a few months to now."

There was a old bug like that about a year ago where you sometimes had to be patient and not click on anything after pressing Send. If you did that it would eventually send it a couple of minutes later. Mozilla insisted that was a performance problem, not a hang. I don't have the bug number handy but I ran into that problem for several months. It was a configuration specific bug. I'd heard about it for several months before it first occurred to me. Very irritating. For a while I used a old version of Thunderbird (24.*) that didn't have that problem instead, when it got too annoying. I had both it and the current release installed in different directories, but using the same profile.

What version of Thunderbird (52.9.1 or 60.0) are you using?
xmontero
Posts: 30
Joined: April 1st, 2004, 4:18 am

Re: Background process window to monitor/stop zombies

Post by xmontero »

I'm currently using 62.0.3 (64-bit)

I wonder if there are "log files" at which to look for.

About "waiting" sometime ago I tried to leave it for some hours, but wit ho success. It was not a "failed, then wait random 1 to 5 mins, retry, success, end", it seemed more a thread-race condition / deadlock or similar.
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